Getting to Initial Scale

Everyone has tough quarters, and usually, at least one tough year (more on that here). As we approach $10m, and then again as we approach $20m, and then again as we approach $X0m … we often blame a factor that I believe rarely is really real — The Law of Large Numbers. The Law of […]

There’s a little bit of death-by-a-hundred cuts that many SaaS companies box themselves into. As they scale, they get out of the hackey way they do contracts, NDAs, proposals, and other documents. They have their controller, then their VP of Finance, then their CFO review things, then hand off to the General Counsel. Which takes […]

For the first time in my career, I’ve worked with amazing first-time managers as CEOs. Before I was a CEO, I was a mid-level manager, a director. And then a VP. Across a few start-ups. Before I was first a founder. Those management team weren’t perfect, and I wouldn’t copy everything they did. But at […]

The most important thing is not to chase the shiny penny, assuming you are growing at least 60% Year-over-Year. You’ve done the Impossible. You’ve gotten 50, 100, whatever # of businesses to pay you $1,000,000 a year. There are 10,000 new apps out there. It’s “impossible” to get to $1m. You did it. Now, the […]

There’s an endless and lively debate about the advantage of being in the SF Bay Area in SaaS. I’ve done 22 investments. The vast majority got started outside of SF, and all but 2 moved here. I’ve invested in founders from Paris (3x), Estonia, Portugal, London, Sweden, Belgium, Washington D.C., Chicago, New York, and more. […]

In the old days, folks would criticize start-ups as “just a feature”. Oh Google/Salesforce/Microsoft will just build that. Back in the day when the world was a desktop OS, there was a lot of truth to that. When the web became our OS, that started to fade. The reality is, in SaaS, Salesforce has built […]

Many SaaS companies hit an “organic lead plateau” at several phases: When you get Really Big, at some point, every company in the world is an Opportunity. Box, Salesforce, etc. really don’t have many new opportunies to hit up. Instead, they have to work them better. This can hit you around $50-$80m-$100m ARR or so. […]

We’ve talked a lot on SaaStr about not screwing up that VP of Sales hire. Done right, it will accelerate your company to the next level. Done wrong — you can lose the better part of a year, and half of your last round of capital. And we’ve talked a lot about the trade-offs in […]

Recently on SaaStr, we did an important post on a simple Trailing Four Month Financial Model. This is one of my best hacks. If you average the growth rate over your last four months, and keep updating it — you’ll have a real-time model that keeps you honest. More on that here. But what about just […]

When I was a founder, I though Net Promoter Score (“NPS”) was a pretty dumb, Big Company metric. There were a bunch of things I didn’t like about it: NPS is backwards looking. It doesn’t tell you much about your prospects, the future, or your most recent customers. I wanted to see the future. […]

We’ve had a lot of discussions on SaaStr and at SaaStr events on founders from outside the U.S. and the Bay Area coming here. We haven’t done enough on the opposite. When to go there. When to open your first international offices. We will do a couple of posts here from guest authors soon. But let […]

Our good friend Michael Krigsman, who runs the excellent blog and interview platform CXO Talk, did me a huge favor at the ’16 Annual and interviewed Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. The interview and part of the transcript is below. I’m going to make you click over to Michael’s blog for the full transcript but […]

So a while back on SaaStr, we did a couple of posts about how B2B and SaaS marketing needed to catch up. That you needed your VP of Marketing to make a real lead commit, to have a true quota of some form. Not just get you blue pens with your logo on it. Even […]

One thing I see most SaaS companies do a pretty crappy job until they have a great finance team is a go-forward model. A real financial model for the next year. It’s not that everyone doesn’t do one. Most do. It’s just … they tend to not really make any sense. Not when […]

I grabbed this post from Brendon Cassidy, VP of Sales at LinkedIn, EchoSign, and Talkdesk, because I thought it had a great checklist for all of us to take a look at. Brendon wrote this post about his learnings about how he doubled sales once again in one quarter (the story of how he did […]